Taiwan Detains 10 for Visa Scam That Brought in Thousands of Chinese

Prosecutors announced on Thursday that police have detained ten people during the investigation of a visa scam that brought thousands of Chinese into Taiwan, some of whom may have been Chinese espionage assets.

The scheme involved Chinese front operations in Taiwan, including corporations and civic groups, requesting visas for Chinese to visit on “professional exchanges.” This bypassed the tougher scrutiny given to tourist visa applications, allowing Chinese Communist Party officials and intelligence agents to slip into Taiwan.

The investigation is politically turbocharged, since Taiwan’s presidential elections are only a few weeks away, and pro-Beijing opposition political parties and activist groups have been implicated. One of the suspects detained after Taiwan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) conducted raids on five different locations on Wednesday, alleged ringleader Hung Chun-lin, is a former staffer for the main Beijing-leaning opposition party, the Kuomintang.

According to a CIB investigator quoted by the Taipei Times on Thursday, the case may have “severe repercussions for national security” because the operation appears to have been directed by the United Front Work Department, a notorious Chinese agency that works to subvert Taiwanese companies and civic groups.

Investigators say over a hundred front companies and nonprofit organizations were involved in the scheme, along with some 20 travel agencies. At least two of the Chinese Communist Party officials who illicitly entered Taiwan were high-ranking officers of the United Front Work Department.

Hung and his fellow conspirators, some of them family members, are thought to have raked in over $325,000 U.S. in profits since early 2017 by selling their services to dubious Chinese visitors. Hung evidently began putting together his network of shell companies at least a decade before that. Prosecutors say the operation might have counted over 10,000 customers.

Incumbent Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen currently enjoys a strong polling lead over the Kuomintang candidate, Han Kuo-yu. A poll released on Tuesday showed Tsai leading Han by 51-29. The pollsters noted that Han has actually been asking his supporters to lie to pollsters in order to lure Tsai and her voters into a false sense of complacency ahead of the election, but he was down by double digits before issuing that directive in November, and critics derided his poll-skewing tactics as “laughable and ignorant.”

The top U.S. diplomat for Asia, David Stilwell, on Thursday warned China not to interfere in the Taiwanese elections and blamed Chinese belligerence for deteriorating relations between Beijing versus Taipei and Washington.